The passage below is from the book Five Lectures on Blindness by Kate M. Foley. Read the passage. Then answer the questions.
When mentally equipped, all blind students should be sent to college, and urged to fit themselves as teachers. In every college and university blind men should occupy chairs in history, English, economics, and mathematics. I know two blind men in this state well qualified to teach any of these subjects, who are forced to accept inferior positions, because educators generally fail to realize that blindness is no bar to mental attainment, and that the ability to teach does not depend upon the ability to see with the eyes. This will be better understood when the coeducation of blind and seeing children becomes more general—God speed the day! As music teachers, concert players, leaders of orchestra, or masters of the violin and 'cello, the blind should have an even chance of success, but their inability to read music at sight, or watch the director's baton often deprives them of positions which their quick ear and well trained memory would enable them to fill with profit to themselves and satisfaction to the public.
And so in all the professions. I know a man who, before he lost his eyesight, was considered an eminent lawyer, but now his associates regard him pityingly, and his clients take their business elsewhere. When the light went out of the eyes of this brilliant man, it did not take his brain as well. He is fitted to be a consulting lawyer or court pleader, and could occupy a chair in a college of law. Surely, there is something radically wrong when these conditions exist! Surely the public needs to open its eyes, and polish its glasses in order to see more clearly that there is a mental blindness, more pitiful, more far‐reaching in its consequences, than physical blindness, however hard or uncomfortable the latter condition may be. Someone facetiously suggested that I call this lecture "bringing light to the seeing," and, in a sense, this is what I am trying to do. But the light is carried by a kindly hand, and the hand is the index to a heart in which there is no bitterness, no malice, no distrust―a heart brimming over with love, with hope, with confidence, and with a belief that the public will see the light, and, seeing it, and reading my message in its beams, will pass it on to others, adding to it as it goes, until it floods every corner of our vast state, and result in untold good for my people.

The questions

1. What evidence does the author offer that the blind are not given equal
opportunity to succeed in various professions?

2. What is the author’s objective in giving this lecture? How do you know?